A couple of weeks ago, Lance Knobel asked me what I thought of MarketRiders after reading Erick Schonfeld’s write-up. I kept on meaning to get around to it — you know how these things are — but before I could, Ron Lieber beat me to the punch. Ron says he likes the service, which basically keeps track of your ETF portfolio and tells you when it looks like it’s in need of a rebalancing.

An “Engagement Agreement” signed by Lotito, Jim Biden, and LBB Holdings, the partnership set up by the two Bidens and Lotito to buy Paradigm… promises James Biden and Lotito a “Placement Fee” of 10 percent of any money invested by clients they brought in.

Let’s say you have two apples. You’re scared of losing those apples, and you want to be sure that they’re absolutely safe. So you give them to the government, and in return the government promises to give you back two apples in a year’s time. You’re happy, and the government gets to eat your apples today, not worrying about paying you back until this time next year. So the government’s happy too. This is known as a “flat yield curve”, and it tends to happen when the economy is depressed and the general mood is rather grim.

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The $27 million facility, which was built with revenue bonds, went into default last year. Bond payments are being made out of a reserve fund, which will have to be replenished and payments made, once revenue starts.

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Gillian Tett was just in the office to talk about her new book; I interviewed her for Reuters TV, and the results should be up soon. But we got to chatting afterwards, and she made a great point which we didn’t cover in the more formal interview and which she says she would have liked to have put in her book. But since it’s not there, I can at least put it on YouTube. She talks about the Bistro deal (see Jesse for background on that), and how it can be seen as a metaphor for the financial system more generally: